Prestige TV

It's Not Just True Detective: Prestige Television Is Leaving Female Creators Out

With Lena Dunham and Girls, Jenji Kohan and Orange Is the New Black, and Shonda Rhimes’s mighty empire of shows, it seems like a great time for women in TV, not just as subjects but as creators, too. Narrow your focus to the prestige dramas that occupy so much conversation about TV, however, and the picture shifts from rosy to grim. At The Huffington Post, TV critic Maureen Ryan crunched the numbers and uncovered some startling facts. Here are two of the big ones:

“With one exception over the course of four decades, HBO has not aired
an original one-hour drama series created by a woman. With one
exception over the course of four decades, HBO has not aired an
original one-hour drama or dramatic miniseries creatively led at its
debut by a person of color.”

Want to see it in chart form? You got it:

We've written recently about how women are making remarkable gains toward equal representation on TV staffs; they hold 28 percent of the behind-the-scenes job on broadcast television, compared with just 16 percent of those jobs on films. But prestige television, represented by offerings from networks like HBO, AMC, FX, Showtime, and recently Netflix, lags dramatically far behind. According to Ryan’s research, of the 97 people responsible for creating hour-long narratives on those five outlets in the last decade, only 12 have been women. Two have been people of color. Those figures don't completely explain why the primary faces of TV's “Golden Age” have been white men—Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White, Nucky Thompson, Rust Cohle—but you have to figure there's a correlation. True Detective has come under fire from some very smart people for its general lack of interest in its female characters. But from the looks of this study, it’s just a small part of a larger system that, as a rule, leaves female voices out.

“We can do better; we are doing better; we are striving to do better,” an HBO spokesman told the Huffington Post, and I believe them. Hopefully they also ponder the striking question that Ryan asks in her piece:

“If the dictum of good writing is ‘write what you know,’ what do women
and people of color know? What dreams and nightmares do they have?
What are their battles and fantasies? What stories aren't we hearing
from them?”